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Ralph Fiennes will direct a bizarre adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata’s haunting Snow Country. The story has been relocated to Canada.

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Margaret Atwood contends that Richard Powers’ writing is as undervalued as Melville’s was in the 19th century.

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“True artists are possessed,” wrote John Gardner. “They are messianic egomaniacs. They believe that what they do is unspeakably important: it is only that conviction that makes the writer himself important.”

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Many home- schooling parents “unschool” their children — i.e., reject not just school, but “classes, curriculums and textbooks.”

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Shields to write Vonnegut’s biography, with blessing

When you think of Harper Lee, do you think bad-ass? Neither did I, until I started reading Charles J. Shields’ Mockingbird, an unauthorized biography that paints the young Lee as a quick-witted, potty-mouthed, intensely private law school drop-out whose success as a first-time novelist so overwhelmed her that she retreated into the bosom of her Alabama hometown, never to publish . . .

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